135. (July 2024) Harkfast, the Making of the King, by Hugh C Rae — The Tabletop Roleplayers' Book Club

Harkfast Q3

clash_bowley — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:33:36 +0000

Q3 The Picts were portrayed as stunted, dark, primitive people. Why did the author do this? Was it simply some odd anti-pict racisim? Or was there another reason?

Harkfast Q1

clash_bowley — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:31:40 +0000

Harkfast is written in a style which was both narratively particularly brutal and textually filled with strange and archaic words. How did this style work for you?

Harkfast Q6

clash_bowley — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:36:56 +0000

Did you enjoy reading this book? Would you go back for more from this author?

Harkfast Q7

clash_bowley — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:37:38 +0000

The ending of the book was more of a stopping place. Did this bother you? Did you wish for a sequel to tell the next part of the story of Ruan and his progress in becoming king?

Harkfast Q8

clash_bowley — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:38:49 +0000

Would you use anything from this book in gaming? What would you take? How would you use it? How did this book inspire you, if it did?

Harkfast Q5

clash_bowley — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:35:26 +0000

Did you empathize with any of the characters in the book? Who were they?

Harkfast Q4

clash_bowley — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:34:31 +0000

This book was full of rapes, murders, and torture. Why did the author take this tack? What was gained and what was lost in showing this brutality

Harkfast Q2

clash_bowley — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 15:32:29 +0000

The spotlight character - the person through whose eyes we see the story unfold - is the young Prince Ruan, Yet the book is named Harkfast after the Druid. Why do you think the writer did that?

About Hugh C Rae

RichardAbbott — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 17:56:40 +0000

Hugh Crauford Rae was a son of Isobel and Robert Rae. He published his first stories aged 11 in the Robin comic, winning a cricket bat the same year in a children’s writing competition. After graduating from secondary school, he worked as an assistant in the antiquarian department of John Smith's bookshop. At work, he met her future wife, Elizabeth.
Published since 1963, he started to wrote suspense novels as Hugh C. Rae, but he also used the pseudonyms of Robert Crawford, R.B. Houston, Stuart Stern (with S. Ungar) and James Albany. On 1973, his novel "The Shooting Gallery" was nominee by the Edgar Award. On 1974, he wrote the first few romance novels with Peggie Coghlan, using the popular pseudonym Jessica Stirling. However, when she retired 7 years after the first book was published, he continued writing more than 30 on his own, and also as Caroline Crosby. His female pseudonyms first became widely known in 1999, when "The Wind from the Hills" was shortlisted for Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.
Widowed nine years ago, Hugh died on September 24, 2014 at the age of 78.

Cover blurb for Harkfast

RichardAbbott — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 17:55:19 +0000

The time is the mysterious twilight age between the fall of Rome and the long night of the Dark Ages. The place is primitive Britain, where a magic power with roots in the dimmest reaches of the past makes its final stand against the forces of bloody barbarism and ravaging conquest. It is then and there that Harkfast, last of the great druid priests, must find the youth destined to be King of the Celts and mold him with magic and with might into the hero foretold by prophecy and threatened by every danger in a world sliding in to the abyss.